Tuesday, March 20, 2012

An open letter to police

You already have been, and will increasingly be given, draconian and predatory orders against Occupy. You have been told to
use our strengths against us. You have been told we are a gang of some
sort. You have been told we are low-level terrorists. It is a classic
move, to dehumanize targeted people into The Other, someone not as human as
you, in order for you to brutalize without pangs of conscience. This in
and of itself should be a warning sign.

Occupy fights corruption and unfairness.

The
only people afraid of Occupy are the corrupt and unfair. Please worry
if you sense that your orders only benefit the corrupt and unfair.
Please consider that in following increasingly draconian orders against a
peaceful movement fighting corruption and unfairness, that you may be helping the corrupt and unfair to not only get away with it, but to increase this downward spiral to their benefit.

Look down the line at the effect of systematic assault
upon those who seek to correct the terrible problems in this country.
Does attacking Occupy reduce the chances of these problems being
corrected? Why would you wish to increase the chance that the problems
in the world may not be corrected? Ask your children about their fears,
about the lack of jobs and the jobless rate for those in and just out of
college. Ask about their increasing tuition fees (monies going into the
pockets of the school's top staff), about the depth of their debt and
lack of opportunity to pay it off. Ask about the foreclosure fraud
issues:

"..from the WSJ on Monday:
Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are lining up to become
landlords to cash-strapped Americans by bidding on pools of foreclosed
properties being sold by Fannie Mae..."

Above all, please watch the films "Inside Job"
about the banking fraud debacle and Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love
Story". You'll see airline pilots having to go on food stamps
to get by; corporations taking out life insurance policies on employees
and then not paying their families; a bank's discussion of Plutocracy
(kings and queens) and unfortunately, much, much more.

Here is the link to "Capitalism: A Love Story". A $2.00 charge,
and you have a 30 day window in which to view it, you don't have to
immediately after paying:

"'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial
crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of
people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the
Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse.
Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial
insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the
rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and
academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland,
England, France, Singapore, and China."

There are cops who crave violent confrontations,
and use them as badges of honor, to instill a sense of "we are more than
them", of personal superiority through force and belonging to a group
(read: gang) of similar others. I love you as fellow humans and hope to
one day show you that you are as everyone else, and that hurting one
hurts everyone, including yourself. Do your actions improve the world? Are they honorable? Is it how you would wish to be treated? Honor and esteem come from honorable and esteemable actions. What are you turning yourself into? Does anyone you love, fear you?

Occupy are fighting these problems, both directly and in actions drawing attention to them. How much worse can it become, if there is no one willing to brave a police baton or arrest, to make positive change? Why else would orders come down to stop us, if not to benefit those causing the problems?

So we're marching in the street. To call attention to the problems, and to call everyone to us in unified action against the problems, to build a better world. Please let us through.

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and
decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it
means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system
with his or her whole soul." -M.K. Gandhi

(I speak here only for and from myself, not for Occupy Los Angeles or the Occupy movement in general. This is an autonomous perspective/action. And I haven't even touched upon Glass-Steagall and Citizens United and ALEC and the NDAA and HR347...)